Original artwork, not a still
Biographia Literaria · 1817
What if you slept, and what if in your sleep you dreamed, and what if in your dreams you went to heaven and there you plucked a strange and beautiful flower, and what if when you awoke you had the flower in your hand? Ah, what then?
Behind the line
What it means
Our interpretation.
The speaker builds a chain of hypotheticals: sleeping, dreaming, gathering a rare flower in heaven, and waking with it in hand. Each step makes the impossible seem more real. The closing question asks what one would make of such proof that a dream was more than a dream.
Context reviewed
